Comment by amiga386
17 hours ago
> There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years
I will, it's ChavTowns.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061013053524/http://www.chavto...
Still running as https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/
Also the owner is giving up on it as of the start of this year -- mainly because nobody visits the site; churnalists just freeboot it and they rank higher on google. https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/top-10-worst-places-to-live-in-e...
Now that's an interesting trend. It's no longer feasible to have an independent web site, because nobody will visit it because you don't have the page rank. Journalists that do find your site copy your data and may add a link (that noone vists). Their pagerank is much higher, so they get all search engine links and all the ads, for your content.
Between that, Google reposting your content and AI's hoovering up everything in site it hardly seems worth publishing online anymore.
We have this situation in lithuanian web for a two decades now.
Once the big news networks (DELFI.lt, 15min.lt, lrytas.lt, alfa.lt and few others) bought out the largest blogs and connected them to their own domains, there isn't much of an independent web left. Owners of the websites back then gladly sold out (and I would have done it too), because it seemed like a great idea to sell your work back in the 2008-ish for real profit, an unique chance (imagine monetising your content when you have only 3 mil. theoretical consumers! There isn't much lithuanian speakers) and especially during the economic crisis.
Then the other blogs were attached to the networks by the generous offers of "let us publish and we will give backlinks, maybe" + "we will just copy it because we know that you won't bother taking us to court, it's too small of a country, you know".
So now whatever you google, you get mostly these results: 7 big network sites and subsites, 2 auto-translated AI slop generated by someone in other side of the planet, 0.9 of business pages and 0.1 something actually personal.
No wonder that almost all content creators moved to social networks by the 2015-ish. They still are there.
I wonder what will change this. A web apocalypse? Mass demand of in-person, non-online "content"? I wonder...
Yikes, I spent 15 years living in one of the Top 10 and my summers in another one. I probably agree, though. The rot was showing in most of those by the late 80s and they went very swiftly downhill after that.
To counter those depressing places, these towns and villages seem lovely:
https://www.thetimes.com/best-places-to-live/location-guide/...
I can't see the list because of the paywall but my guess is they are all medium sized market towns. Large enough to have the facilities you need but not so big that they become impersonal.
> organisations who despite their name, do not give a flying ** about their social housing stock
> and run-down decaying towns in the whole country
You cannot simultaneously have landlords living in Spain and well maintained local housing. Both are expensive. Pick only one. There exists a sweet spot when people are desperate enough to live in a place and pay every rent for any housing, but the sugar coating has washed off.
PS. How could they miss Bedford in the ranking?!
The social housing stock is run by corporate landlords with UK offices. It's still poorly maintained anyway.
Not sure how living in Spain is expensive compared to UK. Cheaper living, lower taxes.
"Expat's cost of living" is different from "native's cost of living".
That author on Slough,
> Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with ‘The Office’ before giving up and writing lame punching-down anti-woke “gags” for the educationally subnormal
That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series about a well-meaning care worker who thinks it's more important to be kind than popular, and After Life, a series about a man who loses his wife young and how he deals with grief.
He also did The Invention of Lying, which, 16 years since I watched it in the cinema, is still the answer I give without hesitation to "what's the worst movie you've ever seen?"
For me that has to be High Life. Pitched to me as "Robert Pattinson has to to take care of a baby in space", in reality it was basically a side plot to "serial killers and rapists are stuck on a spaceship together" and all that implies.
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Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
John Betjeman (1906 - 1984)
There’s also his standup career of being extra atheist as if the world has never seen a famous lapsed Christian Brit
I concluded Noah's Arc was bollocks when I was 8 so I don't know why he goes on about it at his age
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> lapsed Christian Brit
I don't think he is a lapsed Christian though?
Edit: seems not